Name: Litecoin (LTC) – http://www.litecoin.org/Currently Trading at: USD$4.5 (0.011 BTC)Why: Second only to Bitcoin in Market Cap. One of the oldest, has been slammed and there are many that think it is doomed. I don’t think it is. The original creator (Charlie Lee) now works for Coinbase and has indicated he’s trying to promote Coinbase to accept LTC. Litecoin volume in Chinese Yen often outweighs Chinese Yen Bitcoin volume. Scrypt ASIC’s have sent the difficult soaring (https://bitcoinwisdom.com/litecoin/difficulty) and it is by far the most accepted Alt globally. If a “not so different to BTC” alt is going to succeed, it’s going to be Litecoin. With that said though, if Bitcoin is going to be adopted by Wall Street and sent to rediculous price points in the future I can Litecoin being the “peon coin” for normal people. Merged mining with Dogecoin is now possible which may be helpful from a marketing standpoint.Why Not: It’s “Not so different”. Only scrypt makes it different to Bitcoin so it may well move into irrelevance. Miners are now looking to recoup their investment and dump their Litecoin. I’m not sure if this is an accurate statement though as mining equipment is now no longer a casual investment so there is generally a longer term ROI expectation.

Name: Monero (XMR) – http://www.monero.cc/Currently Trading at: USD$1.785 (0.0035 BTC)Why: Seems to be the ‘most popular’ crypto currency based on Cryptonote technology (https://cryptonote.org/). Despite political issues in the Cryptonote space (there are quite a few derivations) Monero has persevered with some significant backing and an active exchange market. Due to it’s CN background if the dark web markets (Silkroad or Agora for instance) pick this coin up as an alternate to BTC for acceptance I’d expect an immediate increase in value as it breaks out of it’s 0.003 -> 0.005 trading range.Why Not: There’s a lot of political issues within Cryptonote at the moment as the Core Dev’s seem to have had a falling out. XMR itself has a very immature wallet (command line only) although mining it is quickly becoming more and more difficult (contributing to it’s underlying strength).

Name: Stellar (STR) – http://www.stellar.org/Currently Trading at: USD$0.0040098 (0.00000978 BTC)Why: Stellar is essentially a clone of Ripple however the initial distribution of the coin itself is “fairer”. Like Ripple it is essentially a “transaction fee” currency in the sense that it is aimed more at the transport layer of money transfers allowing a user to transport USD over the Stellar/Ripple networks with fees being rendered in Stellar/Ripple. I think of these type of cryptos as the replacement for the ubiquitous bank transfer or ATM fees (10c etc) and I think these type of currencies are likely to get banking acceptance FIRST. Ripple’s release was slammed by the Bitcoin community on launch partially due to it seeking to bridge crypto to the financial instituions many chose Bitcoin to avoid but also because it’s distribution involved the organisation withholding significant amounts of the currency internally and dishing out to founding members. Ironically the founder of Stellar is one of these members so perhaps this was a concern internally for a long time as well.

Why Not: It’s a clone. It’s a blatant clone. Ripple is ahead in adoption with Fido bank onboard plus a few more. That said though both are very early in their adoption so maybe Stellar can catch up, we shall see!

Name: StorjCoin (SJCX) – http://storj.io/Currently Trading at: USD$0.01585342 (0.00003815 BTC)Why: StorjCoin is “crypto icloud” or at least that’s what it’s aspiring to be. Spare disk capacity is sold for SJCX and conversely is bought for SJCX. As a concept it’s unique in the crypto space as far as overall execution and “where they are at”. There is Maidsafe however this looks like more of a mutation into blockchain (ie. Maidsafe has been around a long time before Bitcoin but wasn’t a blockchain backed implementation) and has no fixed timeline. Storjcoin itself has bumped up 50% in value since it’s IPO. I must admit a bit of a bias here as I’m now focused pretty heavily on storage infrastructure which makes me immediately interested in merging the ideas of crypto+storage .Why Not: I’m not a fan of IPO’s for cryptos. The concept that dev’s will be paid upfront for something that Satoshi gave away is a bit of a concerning trend that makes me ask “you don’t believe in your idea enough to work on it without pay initially?”. Nonetheless as a concept and what it promises Storj looks interesting.

DISCLAIMER: While this CD should do nothing more than boot into a Desktop environment it has tools on it (like basically any Linux) that could destroy data if not used correctly. I take no responsibility for your success or failure but suffice to say ‘it works for me’.

That was the first conversation I had with Gary Meadows. I was 14 and Gary & Marita (his lifetime partner) had been running a small business called Aussiehosts off a reseller account for the past year. After selling dialup accounts & web design services (EDIT Group) their small dabble had grown faster than they had expected and now Gary was ‘going big’ with a single 300Mhz 1RU box colo’d out of a U.S. Datacentre.

What follows is an attempt at a historical & humorous account of a good friend, a great guy and ‘the guy’ that helped me find the career path I’ll now probably do for the rest of my life.

By Christmas School Holidays 1999-2000 we’d agreed I was going to start spending more time at the businesses salubrious head office (aka the family garage) in Kalangur, Queensland but first my mother had some questions for Gary when he arrived on a hot humid day in Gladstone, QLD:

“He’s not going to be working on those pornographic websites is he?” said my mother (an English teacher of 20 years but not quite up with this internet thingamajig)“No Carole we’re a legitimate hosting business” said Gary“And he’s mentioned you’re willing to pay him?” she said with an element of disbelief (at that time I’d had a checkered history with the important things of real ‘school work’)“Yes, I’ll pay him and put him up at our place” he replied“Oh, I hope you’re charging him rent” she said“Yes Carole, that’s factored in” he said (it wasn’t actually but a white lie was worth the hassle :))“Ok, well, make sure he does some house work and if he misbehaves send him home on the train because he’s already taken too much of your time and you shouldn’t have to put up with any rubbish from him”“I’m sure it will be fine” he said re-assuredly

By 2001 the RaQ was straining. We’d loaded 500 sites onto it and while customers were still happy I was playing wackamole 24/7 with rogue processes and yet the signups kept coming. From his home office Gary & Marita (who somehow tolerated a teenager house squatting in her house for quite a few school holidays!) would work tirelessly on all things support & administration. Even at 15 I was stunned by the hours he did, every day, 5:30am wake up working until midnight – 1am. 7 days a week, 365 days a year although Christmas cheer sometimes made it into his ticket responses too!

By 2003 we were up to 10 servers in the states sporting over 4000 domains, we’d converted to Plesk (version 2.0!) as our hosting platform of choice (despite the tide of Cpanel hosts our customers still liked Plesk more and so did I). At this time Gary & Reeta decided we’d go back into Australian based hosting (bandwidth had come down in price and a new kid on the block by the name of HostingShop was offering dedicated servers) but not before they managed to take a holiday in Fiji while I held the fort over Christmas (despite some issues with a supplier). By 2005 Aussiehosts had grown to a full rack of servers in Australia and some 20 or so servers in the States. From memory we were hosting over 15,000 websites when Gary & Marita decided to sell up to Mcgoohq (now known as Uber).

While I didn’t follow the business to Canberra (I myself decided to move onto different sectors of the I.T. market) I think all of us were proud of what we’d achieved.

So why the story? Well I guess the primary reason is to reinforce what Gary Meadows gave me. He gave me an opportunity to take my interest in computing and turn it into a career path. He provided me an ‘out’ when I was fast heading down a path of little achievement. He taught me how to run a business and the importance of keeping customers happy. He taught me how to inspire confidence in ones business and show commitment to ones customers. For me, these are critical and important lessons that I doubt I would have had the opportunity to learn and for that I’ll be forever indebted.

Finally, he taught me many non business related lessons like the fact I really don’t like country music (years and years of Kenny Rogers, one of his favourites, kinda convinced me of that), that there is only so many Christmas carols (Dec 1 -> Jan 1 equaled 24/7 Christmas carols in the Meadows household!), that it’s better to live life to the full and go out doing what you love (which he proved all the way to the end).

To a great mentor, a great mate and a bloody good bloke, Gary Meadows, Rest in Peace, you WILL be missed.

To Marita & the kids, the three of you were and still are his proudest achievements, my thoughts are with you all.

Stuart

Post Note 1: The dates in this are running on memory, they might not be accurate but the story remains the same.
Post Note 2: I still have the RaQ 550, after we migrated off it Gary had it delivered to the office and gave it to me on my 16th Birthday. It’s now over a decade old yet I keep it for nostalgia because you always have to remember ‘where you came from’.

No, I will not pay $45 to renew a domain. I found it interesting that this came with an Australian postal address which is (for the Google bait: 189 Queen Street, Suite 209, Melbourne) a bit interesting given that this registrar is trying to take my legitimately held (and nowhere near due) domain from my chosen provider and then charge me 4x what I can get from a reputable provider. No thanks Domain Renewal Group.